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Guest Post by Michelle See-Tho Among Lonely Planet guides, endorsements for various restaurants around the world and poignant tales of “self discovery” in foreign lands, the contemporary travel writing scene leaves little room for comedy. However, Tom Doig’s first book, Mörön to Mörön, points at the standard of travel writing and laughs. Part travel guide, […]

— This piece originally appeared as a Crikey news article. This morning, 28-year-old New Zealand author Eleanor Catton made history as the youngest author ever to win the Man Booker Prize, for her intricate tome The Luminaries. It’s been described by the judges as “a dazzling work, luminous, vast”. Catton is only the second Kiwi author to win […]

“Smith Journal was really conceived as a place to kind of pull out stories that get lost between the internet and other print media or don’t get the attention they deserve, so it could be an old dude building boats or it could be a robot worker, or something like that. But it’s really our […]

— This piece originally appeared as a Crikey News article. The shortlist for the 45th annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction wasannounced last night in the UK, and young voices that span the globe have dominated. From a longlist described by the judges as “surely the most diverse in Man Booker history” comes a shortlist with authors from […]

When I meet with Martin McKenzie-Murray, a former speechwriter for a Federal department during the Rudd government’s first time in office, his frustration at the structure and culture of Canberra speechwriting is palpable: “I was never the speechwriter there, I would say, because the culture of the place was the speechwriter. A million people would […]

When I speak with Tom Switzer, he tells me he’s envious of me as I’m the second person he knows who has met Boris Johnson on his Melbourne trip. The week before, the infamous London Mayor – a former editor of The Spectator, the Australian edition of which Switzer himself edits – appeared at the […]

In 2008 during the Democratic presidential primaries, Hillary Clinton repeated an adage made famous by former New York governor Mario Cuomo: “You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose.” She didn’t mention Barack Obama by name, but her audience knew the comment’s target. It was intended as a rebuke to a man who was regarded […]

Guest Post by Farz Edraki The woman next to me on the bus didn’t apologise after a small, green piece of gum shot from her mouth and landed neatly in my lap. “Oh,” was all she said, adjusting her neck pillow and unwrapping another packet of Extras. It was an overnight bus ride from Canberra to […]

Guest Post by Simon Copland In 1971, academic and queer activist Dennis Altman wrote the book Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation. Positioned between the riots at Stonewall in 1969 and the expansion of the gay liberation movement in the 70s and 80s, Homosexual was in many ways before its time. Altman managed to predict the […]

Something was announced last night in the UK that wasn't to do with the royal baby. The longlist for the 2013 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, which judges describe as the most diverse in the prize's history.

Guest Post by Paul Donoughue It was on a long bus ride toward Sarajevo, past shells of houses full of grass and dirt, that I first became aware of the idea of atrocity tourism. The capital of Bosnia Herzegovina is a lovely place. Apart from being visually stunning — a collection of low-set buildings and […]

Guest Post by Myriam Robin Melbourne-based critic and journalist Mel Campbell is the author of Out of Shape, her first book, which was released at the start of June. In the book, Campbell charts her own relationship to clothing, as well as how notions of ‘fit’ and correct dress have persisted and changed throughout the […]